A World Where Everyone Becomes a Creator: The Age of Creative Labor

The narrative that AI is taking jobs has become a cliché. But clichés are not necessarily wrong. The very concept of a profession is facing the most profound upheaval since the Industrial Revolution. Office workers managing spreadsheets, lawyers reviewing statutes, developers writing code, consultants analyzing markets — jobs that seemed impregnable behind the moat of human intelligence are all being shaken. This is not mere prediction; it is already happening. Meta laid off 3,600 employees — 5% of its workforce — and was followed by Microsoft, Amazon, and other global tech giants cutting thousands. McKinsey restructured 2,000 positions, and Shopify's CEO declared in an internal memo: "No new hires unless you can prove AI cannot do the job."

But this is just the beginning. Among the companies building AI models — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — a fierce race toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is underway. If today's AI can assist humans in limited capacities, AGI will surpass humans in every conceivable task. The people creating these systems — Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis — predict AGI will arrive not in decades, but in years.

Whether their bold timelines prove right or wrong, the direction itself does not change. When AGI is realized, everything we have seen so far will be revealed as merely the prologue. The corporate form is fundamentally a byproduct of reducing transaction costs — it is more efficient for many to divide work that one person cannot do alone. But if one or two people working with AI can accomplish what once required dozens or hundreds, the traditional structure of large-scale employment will inevitably dissolve. The day is not far off when the natural question shifts from "why work alone?" to "why belong to an organization at all?"

So what should humans do? Everything that is repetitive, predictable, and reducible to rules will be automated by machines. Yet there remain things machines can imitate but never replace — taste, relationships, and narratives that carry meaning precisely because they come from a specific person. The number of Ghibli-style images AI generates every minute exceeds the total drawings Hayao Miyazaki created in his lifetime. But not a single one of those images can evoke the emotion of a work Miyazaki poured his life into. Today's AI converges toward the statistical mean of its training data, making it structurally weak at producing the unpredictable and the truly original.

This aligns precisely with what we call the work of creators. It is not mere luck that creative work is safe from AI's reach. Interpreting the world through a unique perspective, persuading people with one's own taste and narrative, building trust through relationships — all of this constitutes creation. Standing in front of a camera is not the only form of creativity. And this broader definition of creation is a domain AI is structurally incapable of replacing.

With every new technological paradigm, the shape of work has transformed. New technology absorbed what humans used to do, and humans were pushed into domains machines had not yet reached. The Industrial Revolution replaced muscle; humans moved to the brain. Computers replaced calculation; humans moved to judgment and communication. AI is now poised to replace the entire spectrum of knowledge work, including judgment and communication. So where is the next domain for humans? We believe it is creation. The claim that "everyone will become a creator" may sound like hyperbole today, but saying "everyone will become a factory worker" would have sounded equally absurd at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Yet that is exactly how history unfolded.

The creator economy is already growing rapidly. Goldman Sachs estimates the creator economy will reach approximately $480 billion by 2027. But what we focus on is not the size — it is the direction. As AI automates and consumes ever more of the world's domains, what remains will increasingly be creation in the broadest sense. The boundaries of the creator economy are not merely expanding; they are converging with the boundaries of the economy itself. In other words, the creator economy is not a subset of the future labor market. It is the future labor market. We are not betting on the creator economy simply because it is large. We are betting on it because it is everything the future holds.

A world where corporations dissolve, the concept of employment fades, and every person must become their own means of production. Creators are the prototype — they have been living in that world for over a decade already. The age where everyone becomes a creator has only just begun. This is not idle speculation; it is an inevitability already in motion.

To learn why we jumped into what many call a dying industry, read Why We Built a Creator Agency.